


The Weight of Staying

by celestialminghao



Category: SEVENTEEN (Band)
Genre: Ambiguous/Open Ending, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Internalized Homophobia, M/M, References to Depression, Sad Wen Jun Hui | Jun, Secret Relationship, Suicide, Time Skips, Xu Ming Hao | The8-centric, but u pick up that jun & minghao Die, heavy triggering warning, i wrote this within like 2 hrs so . irs not good, like i dont say in so many words, minghao loves jun til the end of time
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-07
Updated: 2020-07-07
Packaged: 2021-03-05 05:15:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,970
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25118977
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/celestialminghao/pseuds/celestialminghao
Summary: Junhui decides to leave. Minghao decides to stay.Jun and Minghaoare,can be,should be,will be,won’t bealways together.-Minghao wants to stay with Jun.
Relationships: Wen Jun Hui | Jun/Xu Ming Hao | The8
Comments: 2
Kudos: 37





	The Weight of Staying

Minghao wakes up before the sun rises to slitter back to his empty bedroom, away from Junhui.

Finding tranquility in their routine, _finding_ a routine. The ins and outs of a relationship that the world, that their members, weren’t supposed to ever learn about. Hidden kisses and intimacies. Concealed privacies had their own hold on the both of them.

Leaving was too treacherous to consider. 

-

Putting a start date on it wasn’t easy. Saying when they fell in with one another, pinning it exactly.

Is it the day they started to share kisses, or had it been the moment Minghao found himself breathless from Junhui standing too close?

Or had it the first time Minghao felt like they were doing something wrong. Something that they needed to be careful about. 

Or when Seungcheol found them sitting on the couch, Minghao absently thinking he should sit further away from Junhui.

(But always _wanting_ Jun. Always wanting to be close.) 

(Never wanting to be apart from him. Never wanting to think of being away from him.)

-

The whole of it was especially a burden on Junhui.

Junhui wasn’t and never could be happy here.

It was never going to be something he would confide into Minghao, it never really could be. Junhui once explained briefly he found no reason to linger in Korea, to carry on with a life that he had to constantly half live. Junhui once said, ‘there’s no reason for me to be here.’

Minghao rebuttal in the blank, selective way most people do. He hears nothing beyond what centers around himself. “Am I not reason enough?”

Jun tells him. “You’re more than enough. You’re too much.”

-

Four months later, in the spring of their sixth anniversary, Junhui announces he’s leaving Seventeen.

He does so unexpectedly, leaving Minghao with little time to collect himself. 

Minghao approaches Junhui that same evening. “You’re leaving,” he says, point-blank. “What am I supposed to do?”

Jun shrugs. “Stay.”

He does.

-

  
  


Junhui moves out somewhere next to the ocean and stays out of the public eye. Minghao spends every free moment on the phone, texting, or visiting Junhui. His ex-members comment that Junhui’s parting has done nothing to deter their friendship.

Junhui’s parting had done little to affect his relationship with any of Seventeen. He still quite regularly came to visit. 

It was Mingyu who commented to Minghao that Jun seemed less than happy, though. But says that Jun was always a little sad. “I thought he left because it would make him happier, but he seems the same. If not worse.”

That makes Minghao realize Jun hasn’t been necessarily happy for a long time. 

-

Junhui dismisses Minghao's worries, he does so rather quickly. 

“I was never really meant for the ‘idol life,’” Junhui explains. “I was arguably one of the least liked members. I think this was for the best. Nothing was keeping me there.”

“Why wasn’t I enough to make you want to stay?” Minghao asked.

“I need more than just a boy,” Jun answered. “I need life and electricity and heart - You couldn’t give me that.”

“Why do you dismiss me into nothing?” Minghao shouts. “Am I nothing?”

“You’re not nothing-!”

Minghao, for a moment, believes him. Before he turns to leave Jun’s home. A home made without Minghao. “I think I am.”

-

There’s the good days and there’s the bad days. Their bad days were unprecedentedly happening more and more steadily. 

Minghao, a little over half a year after Junhui’s departure, announces a hiatus. He ignores his group’s theories on why he needed to leave, but Minghao finds himself going to Jun. 

The weight of staying, for Minghao, would forever be staying with his home.

(Staying with Jun.)

And the weight of staying, for Jun, was just that.

(Staying.)

-

A year passes in a single moment. Minghao explains to Junhui at length that he needs to make a decision soon.

_Staying_ \- staying with his home, staying with his family, Minghao sees these are not the same.

He is met with a choice. Junhui tells him to choose what he thinks is best.

Minghao has never felt more unwanted.

“Do you want me to leave?” He asks.

“I could never ask you to do that.”

Jun was always too ambiguous in what he wanted. Minghao feels ugly. “But what do you want?”

“I want what you want.”

It makes Minghao fly off the handle. “Do you want me to stay?” He asks. “Do you want me to stay here with you? Live a life, marry, have a family?”

Jun doesn’t answer, but he tells Minghao everything he needs to know.

-

A lot happens.

Their break-up is clean and exact. Once Minghao returns to Seventeen, he even openly begins to explain the length of their relationship to everyone in his group. Minghao specifies his hiatus was driven by Junhui’s departure, but his return did end their relationship.

“He broke up with you because you wanted to rejoin?” Vernon had asked.

Minghao had broken up with Jun. He was sick of their skeleton relationship, something that barely felt alive even when it was new and exciting. Something that felt half wanted by Jun. 

“I broke up with him,” Minghao explains, but leaves it at that.

Occasional visits to Junhui were still made by different Seventeen members, sometimes Minghao even went to see him.

One visit, Minghao found Junhui sitting on the beach when he drove up to his house. He slowly walked down to see him. 

“Joshua told me you were here when he last saw you,” Minghao said. “You like it by the water?”

“Yeah,” Jun had answered. “The noise makes me feel less lonely.”

Minghao wants to yell and scream at Junhui that he shouldn’t feel lonely - he did this to himself. Junhui left everyone, he left himself feeling empty and vulnerable.

Instead, Minghao replies in the saddest way possible. “I feel lonely, too,” he says, only a month after their breakup. “I miss you.”

“I missed you, too,” Jun says.

But Minghao knows it means nothing.

-

It carries on like that for a handful of years. Jun hiding by the ocean and surviving on ever-lessening febal visits from ex-friends and an ex-boyfriend.

When Jun is found on the beach, discarded by the ocean like a hermit crab shell - an empty home, it’s almost unsurprising.

And this time, Minghao doesn’t hesitate in leaving Seventeen, needing to be _near_ Jun. Needing to stay with him. 

He tortures himself. Going to Jun’s house on the ocean and forcing himself to sleep in a deadman’s bed. Waking in the middle of the night from a dream where he calls out to Minghao.

Minghao said once on the phone to Wonwoo, “How did I never notice.”

“It tends to be that way,” Wonwoo says back. “You never notice until it's too late. Then everything makes sense.”

Fans from something that feels like a different lifetime buzz online with condolences and theories. Minghao tortures himself with that, too, obsessively reading the thoughts of millions about how and why.

One says, it all seemed off when Jun left without a word and dropped off the face of the Earth.

They said, it was like he was already dead. 

Minghao feels sick and selfish and lost - so, so, so lost.

-

Jun’s funeral brough fetishizing paparazzi that took their pictures of raw grief to obsessively binge on sadness and purge by the next day with relationship scandals and comebacks.

That’s all this meant to most of the world. A headline to repost and grossly overanalyze, not the absolute heartbreak and pain and disgust and confusion and horrid experience it meant for Minghao.

Somehow a photograph of Minghao crying at the funeral finds its way online, plenty of people making their own comments about how distraught and pained he looks.

One says, Minghao loved Jun so much, this must hurt unbelievably.

-

He leaves Jun’s house on the ocean after three long weeks. Minghao finds an apartment in Seoul that feels small enough to not feel empty with just him inside.

_I love you_ , Minghao thinks late into the night, hoping it reaches Jun somehow.

Minghao dreams of staying. Of not caring whether Jun wanted him there or not. Staying and keeping Jun company for when it got lonely. 

How he rathered to feel unwanted by a living, breathing person than this.

Minghao feels the weight of staying, of leaving, and of disappearing all at once.

-

Sometimes Minghao joined Seventeen fansigns. He stopped being a part of promotions and comebacks, but lingered nearby from insistence by his ex-members. Seokmin tells him. “So you don’t get too lonely.”

Those are difficult days. He listens to fans' compliments to the current members, but some with insensitive questions about who Jun was. Saying, they’ve heard of Seventeen’s Jun, but have never seen him with the group. Then suffering through brief explainations. 

The first time he heard someone say his name, Minghao had to leave.

But another three years, Minghao is still reactive to Jun. He stops attending fansigns, despite Seokmin’s worries about loneliness.

As predicted, that’s exactly what sinks it’s claws into Minghao.

-

Pathetically, Minghao still dreams of staying. Staying with Jun.

Staying, objectively, would mean to leave.

So Minghao, soberly, considers leaving.

-

“I think you should come back,” Seungcheol tells Minghao. “You haven’t been the same since Jun left, but especially since Jun died.”

Minghao finds Seungcheol too bold. Audaciously stating the fact. 

Shoving it in Minghao’s face, someone who cannot comprehend having lost Jun.

So he dismisses. “I don’t think Seventeen needs me anymore.”

There’s no point in arguing that - the last few years had been kind of Seventeen from a career perspective. So Seungcheol clicks his tongue. 

“Maybe, but I think you need Seventeen.”

-

Perhaps Minghao did need a constant.

Jun was a home, something inviting and wanted. But nothing was going to be enough to keep him. No one could make Jun stay aside from Jun. 

So who did Minghao have? Was it selfish to want someone to keep him here, too. 

Had he been using Jun? 

The years of love and secrets, was Jun really there for any of it? 

How much of it had been real? 

-

Jeonghan calls Minghao unexpectedly, explaining Seungcheol told him about propositioning Minghao about rejoining. “Have you given it any thought?” He asks.

Minghao hums, he had been. “Yeah.”

“You should come by soon, we could all talk about it together. All of us.”

He holds back pointing out it wouldn’t be all of them. 

-

Their meeting reminds Minghao of a time where things weren’t necessarily simpler, but ignorant and oblivious. 

He wonders how inconsiderate it is that Minghao wishes he was still so ignorant and oblivious. A time where Jun was still here and Minghao was still beside him. 

(Even if Jun was rotting from the inside out and he was dying a little bit with every breath he took and Jun couldn’t bear any of it so goddamn much that he left. He left. He left. He left. He left.)

Minghao listens to everyone’s intervention-styled worries about how off he’s looked.

By the end, he leaves.

(Again and again, Minghao leaves.)

-

He goes back to Jun’s house on the ocean. Down on the beach where Jun was returned to them by the water. 

How the ocean didn’t want Jun, just like so many other people.

Minghao feels the sand in his toes, the salty spray of the ocean that reminds him of exactly what kind of bitter place he was. 

Minghao leaves.

(Again and again, Minghao leaves.)

  
  


-

Minghao couldn’t stay at Jun’s house on the ocean. He returns to his broom closet apartment - so that it would never feel too big and too empty - and decides to stay. He wants to stay with Jun. 

So he leaves.

(Again and again, Minghao leaves.)

  
  
  


**Author's Note:**

> this was kind of bad and a little all over the place but the basis was: jun and minghao were in a secret relationship. jun is sad. he leaves svt. their relationship becomes rather strained and difficult to manage. they break up. jun is still sad and stays sad for very long time. minghao loves him, though.


End file.
